March 21, 2015, Stevens Oberland Tour

Preparing for an upcoming trip to do the Bernese Oberland gave me the motivation to give Saturday a shot despite a very mixed forecast, and boy was I lucky with conditions. Given the close similarity between the Swiss Alps and our closed local pistes, off I went to Stevens Pass. The base was bony with mixed rain and snow, but I donned my traditional Goretex-hosen and set out. Rain turned to snow after the first couple hundred feet, and for the rest of the day it was coming down pretty good. I started the tour climbing the Skyline glacier and then booting to the summit of der Cowboyhorn.

From Cowboy I skied the Vallee Seventh Heaven to Tye Mill, then up to the col where I saw the only other party of the day. Traversing the ridge I arrived at the Big Chiefberg and skied the super fun Orion schneefeld about 450 feet before snow abruptly stopped. There was quite a bit of new, not too heavy and pretty fast. After such a tough winter, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get some great powder wiggles in so I went for 4 more laps there. It was snowing hard enough to almost fill my skin track each lap, and the skiing just kept getting better and better. Tye skied great after I wrapped the laps up, and is very well-covered. Getting down and seeing that the altimeter showed just 100 feet shy of 5k, of course I had to make a final ascent to the Hogsbackspitze to complete the day.

Lots of fun traversing all over the place on a solo day with the mountain all to myself. There are still goods out there, folks!